Tips for Yummy Healthy Christmas Cookies

There are quite a few Christmas cookies that rely on unique spices for flavor instead of more common ingredients like chocolate, peanut butter or caramel. Many of those include ginger and molasses in the recipe and make tasty, decadent traditional holiday cookies.

Even if you include these spiced cookies in your Holiday fare, you can also make a healthier version for family and friends. Why not give some of the following wonderful spiced cookie recipes as a slightly more nutritious, less fattening alternative?

Healthier Molasses Cookies

Maybe because of the heartier flavor, molasses cookies are part of the traditional holiday cookie roster. Strong and decadent, they often make an appearance at cookie exchange parties.

Try the following substitutions in order to make them a little healthier. First cut the amount of flour in half, making half all-purpose white flour, and the other half whole wheat flour.

Next substitution: replace some of the butter with olive or coconut oil. The rest of your ingredients can stay the same: your sugar, molasses, ginger, and spices such as ground cinnamon, salt, cloves and ginger.

Skinny Gingerbread Cookies

Gingerbread cookies are such a tradition and a huge family favorite, so there’s no way you can skip these, but you can certainly make them healthier. Thankfully, that is easy to do.

Unsalted butter is fine, but switch from white sugar to brown sugar and unsweetened applesauce. Another thing you can do is use an egg white instead of the full egg with yolk, and mix some whole wheat flour as well.

One more tip: reduce the overall amount of sugar by adding some dark molasses instead, along with your usual spices such as cinnamon and ginger.

Chai Spiced Snickerdoodles

Even snickerdoodle cookies can be made healthier by including some chai spice (the perfect addition to your cup of chai tea), together with the usual whole wheat pastry flour, baking powder, cornstarch, coconut oil, vanilla extract, and coconut sugar plus spices like cloves, ginger and cinnamon.

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